City Flowershop

JANE HYDER

Jane Hyder produces paintings, prints and cards from her studios in Karori and Toi Poneke Art Centre, Wellington, New Zealand. She has a graduate Diploma in Fine Art from Massey University and has been an exhibiting artist since 1978 both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. For Jane Hyder ‘art and faith come from the same place’. Working in a fauve-expressionist style, her paintings draw on highly poetic, richly illustrative imagery. Narratives expressed through symbolist gestures, the paintings’ surfaces are expressions of a joie de vivre that seek and deserve comparison with Chagall, for, like Chagall, Jane’s paintings point to an underlying belief that art is a state of soul. Incorporated into this belief is the proximity of the spiritual to the material; her recent works are not merely paintings but art objects whose surfaces cherish both the decoration upon them and their physicality.

These are colourist prints and paintings that could be transported as though personal icons, but, embedded with the histories of their own production, their iconography becomes suggestive of the importance of the art-making process to the artist. The narratives here are thus double-sided. There are both the narratives if the art objects’ histories and the narratives which the paintings themselves depict.

Above all, these are prints and paintings which translate faith through the creative process into art and in turn offer a gift, a generosity of spirit, from the artist to the viewer.

• Hamish Clayton, November 2008.**